Sunday, November 28, 2004

"Kerry was inclined to believe what he was told, and he was told the election was over, but now we're unearthing information that did not surface at first. I suppose the more information Kerry gets, the more you will hear from him."

“We need to investigate, coordinate, litigate, recount and recuse, Mr. Blackwell cannot be both the owner of the team and the umpire.”

Also in that article you can read this:

In analyzing the still-unofficial results, the totals reveal that C. Ellen Connally, an African-American Democratic candidate from Cleveland for Ohio Chief Justice, received more than 257,000 votes than Kerry.

In Butler County, for example, Connally had 45,457 more votes than Kerry. The reason these vote counts are suspect is because Connelly, a retired African-American judge, was vastly outspent in her race, and did not have the visibility of the presidential race. Thus for a more obscure Democratic candidate, farther down on the ticket, to get a quarter of a million more votes statewide than Kerry, suggests something happened to suggest there may have been a transfer of Kerry votes to Bush.

“This looks like a computer glitch or a computer fix,” said Bob Fitrakis, a lawyer, political scientist and Editor of the Columbus Free Press (http://freepres.org) who has written about election irregularities since Bush was declared the winner. Fitrakis is among the team of lawyers who announced they would soon file an election challenge in the state’s Supreme Court.

“Statistically, Kerry, as the Democratic presidential candidate, should have more votes than Connally. In a presidential election, most voters have the priority of casting a vote for president and the votes for president are almost always much higher than those of candidates farther down the ticket. When voters vote for Democratic candidates farther down the ticket, it is usually being driven by a sample ballot from the Party, starting at the top with president. Many voters simply don’t vote for Supreme Court justices. It is highly improbable that Connally’s vote totals would be so much higher than Kerry’s,” Fitrakis said.

The fact that Warren County has such odd vote counts is no surprise to Fitrakis. “The Republican-dominated county threw out all the media and independent vote watchers when votes were being counted at the end of Election Day, claiming ‘homeland security’ issues. This would have easily allowed for the wholesale shifting of a large amount of votes from Kerry to Bush. If you’re behind closed doors, it is easy enough to do. The November issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines show how easy it is to hack the vote and steal an election. The articles are called ‘E-vote emergency: And you thought dimpled chads were bad’ and ‘Could hackers tilt the election?’ I think they did,” explained Fitrakis.

Fitrakis said that when one looks at the Connally-Kerry results across the state, it becomes clear that Connally – who was on the Ohio Democratic Party sample ballots – was getting tens of thousands of votes in counties that were known to be Republican strongholds, until this year’s unprecedented voter registration and mobilization efforts.

There were 15 Ohio counties where Connally’s margin was 5,000 votes or more better than Kerry’s unofficial results. In five counties, Connally had a 10,000-vote margin or better. These counties used punch card, optical scan, and touch screen voting machines – with most using punch card systems.